Carter Manufacturing needed a way to better demo its products. Until now, they leveraged 2D images, charts, and product manuals. As Carter Manufacturing produces high-precision and specialized products, it needs to:

• Be able to showcase products in great detail to its sales team and its clients.
• Enable its teams and clients to interact with the product so they can learn about the different parts. 

Carter Manufacturing had developed its own 3D models and wanted to share them with its sales representatives but it didn’t have an easy way to do this.

• The only way to share a 3D model with the sales team or a client was to share the 3D source file. 
• The only way for the sales team to navigate the 3D object was to use 3D creation software. The sales team did not have the skills or background required to manipulate 3D objects within the specialized 3D software.

• Engineering training expert saVRee, a Sketchfab certified partner, leveraged the Sketchfab 3D viewer and the Sketchfab API to develop the Interface Builder. This web-based tool enables users to create an interactive real-time 3D interface with no coding knowledge required.  
• Carter Manufacturing used the Interface Builder to create an interactive interface to showcase its 3D models of products.

The team at Carter Manufacturing could easily create and customize many aspects of their product interface using saVRee’s Interface Builder, following the steps below. 

• Display any of its Sketchfab-hosted 3D models. 
• Add content such as videos, images, PDFs, and external links to the parts of the interface that surround the model. 
• Enable real-time 3D actions such as cross-section views, variations, annotations and show or hide parts.
• Customize the interface to match its own branding. This includes customizing the loading screen to display the company’s slogan or tagline.
• Enable or disable features such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR).
• Embed the entire interface on any website.

Now, instead of only 2D images and product charts, Carter Manufacturing has an interactive way of showing its products with a 3D interactive interface. 

Carter Manufacturing can now use the 3D interface to onboard and train its sales, marketing, and training teams on its products. These teams can also leverage the interactive interface to educate their own customers. 

Carter Manufacturing can also use this interface at showrooms to educate visitors on its products. 

December 2022

• Paradise Grills’ products are showcased predominantly in its showrooms, using product images and videos, but this in-person approach proved to be particularly challenging during the pandemic.
• The company offers an extensive range of personalized options for its outdoor kitchens but didn’t have any way to visualize these tailored products for its customers.
• Paradise Grills needed a configurator tool to enable clients to customize, visualize, and order products online, and also to support the showroom sales team.

• Augmented Reality specialist AR-range, who has created Sketchfab-based tools to support eCommerce sales and personalized products for several years, was brought on board to improve the 3D configurator.
• AR Range optimized the quality of the existing 3D assets.
• Paradise Grills asked AR-range to create AR views for all possible production variants—a total of more than 100,000 configurations.
• AR-range created a 3D application, using its proprietary scripts, that recreates what the user selects in the configurator. The app saves the variant selected by the user as a 3D file, automatically generating the appropriate AR views for iOS and Android devices.

• The entire process, from concept to API, took just two months.

• The 3D configurator with AR function has turned out to be a game changer. It’s now Paradise Grills’ primary sales tool and has proved to be very popular, both with customers and the sales team.
• This revamped 3D configurator gives Paradise Grills a new way to effectively showcase its products with many customization options, along with an AR view. Customers can now visualize how their configured products will look like from their homes
• The tool has helped Paradise Grills to set itself apart from their competitors.
• The AR view is a fantastic way to drive more customer engagement and thus sales—sales have risen by 6.25% since the introduction of the AR solution.

November 2022

Four times a year, the company hosted in-person product review meetings at their headquarters in Colorado. 

• For every meeting, more than 1,000 samples representing new styles and colorways had to be manufactured in Asia and then shipped to the HQ office in Colorado, where they were displayed to merchandisers. 
• Attendees of the four meetings traveled from different parts of the world specifically for these meetings. 

This overall process was:

• Costly in terms of sample-making and travels. 
• Time-consuming, since people who traveled from abroad, didn’t have access to the samples once the meetings were over and they had traveled back to their countries.
• Inefficient: the production of these samples and the long-distance travel of attendees was no longer a tenable solution.

• In 2018, Crocs decided to try a different approach and digitized all of their sample portfolios in 3D. 

• Then, Crocs used Sketchfab for Teams, the 3D asset management platform by Sketchfab to:

• • Store and centralize their 3D assets in a secure and seamless way.
  • Organize and classify their digital sample portfolio inside folders hierarchies.
  • Invite collaborators to their shared Sketchfab account so that they could review samples from the comfort of their home or office.

Sketchfab’s 3D asset management platform: Sketchfab for Teams

• Crocs fully digitized their quarterly product review meetings, thus eliminating the respective travel and shipment costs associated with transporting dozens of people and thousands of physical samples to the meetings.

• Crocs’ collaborators can easily review the design of the samples in Crocs’ Sketchfab account on-demand, which helps speed the go-to-market process. 

• The fully digitized approach proved to be exceptionally useful and impactful when the pandemic brought travel to a standstill in early 2020.

October 2021

Just start the embed and click the AR button in the bottom right.

The engagement your model will get depends greatly on the quality of its integration on your site. This article will help you optimize the appearance of your AR-enabled Sketchfab embed.

First thing first, before you do anything, you need to activate AR on your 3D model. 

Setting up existing Sketchfab 3D models for viewing in AR is easy. Click on “Edit properties” on the model page, and toggle the “Allow AR” button to the on setting. Once AR has been turned on for a model, you will be able to see the [AR] icon in the bottom right corner of the model viewer.  

Here is a detailed article that contains step-by-step instructions for preparing models for AR.

In the next step, we’ll see how you can easily customize the appearance of your embed by adding specific parameters to the embed code.

Check and update a model’s scale using Sketchfab’s 3D Editor, click “Edit 3D Settings” on the model page, then click on the “AR/VR” icon. 

Sketchfab’s rendering assumes that your models were created on a metric scale. So, if you create and export your 3D model measured to scale and in meters, the AR world-scale should already be correct by default.

If you have not set your model in meters prior to uploading it to Sketchfab, you can define the scale in the “Scale” settings. Use the “Reset Scale” button to indicate how many of your model’s units are equivalent to one meter. 

For instance, if you created your model in centimeters, such as the one below, you would choose 100. You can find a table of measurement conversions here.

Keep in mind that every time you save your model after changing the scale or other settings, such as Materials, Sketchfab will regenerate the glTF and USDZ versions of the model. This process can take 5-10 minutes, depending on the model, so don’t worry if your changes are not immediately visible in AR. 

You can check the status of the glTF and USDZ reprocessing in the “Download your model” section of “Model Properties”.

Learn more about model conversion here.

Once embedded, anyone with a compatible device will be able to view your model in native, app-free AR. 

To get the embed code of the model, click the “Embed” button on the model’s page, just underneath the viewer and optimize the model embed code in the embed pop-up settings.

Once you are in the embed window, in the appearance section:

• Untick the description boxes unless needed.
• Select the dark theme, which puts a dark background behind the viewer’s buttons, making it easier for viewers to see the buttons on light-colored backgrounds.
• Whitelabel your model by ticking the brand boxes to remove the Sketchfab logo and link.

In the content section: 

• Tick Autostart to have the model load directly and streamline the user journey.
• Choose “Always show hint” from the Navigation hint dropdown menu to indicate that the model is interactive in 3D. This will display the “click & hold to rotate” icon and text every time the model loads.

In the control options: 

• Switch off all the buttons (unless needed) except for AR in order to only show the necessary functions in the viewer.

Once your code is ready, you just need to integrate it into your site. In the embed settings popup, click “copy to click board” to get the iframe code. Once embedded, anyone with a compatible device will be able to view your model in native, app-free AR.

To preview the embed you can simply visit the URL listed in the iframe’s “src” attribute:

“https://sketchfab.com/models/87cb4826b7a746f193c114b7f37695d5/embed?autostart=1&camera=0&ui_animations=0&ui_infos=0&ui_stop=0&ui_inspector=0&ui_watermark_link=0&ui_watermark=0&ui_hint=2&ui_help=0&ui_settings=0&ui_vr=0&ui_fullscreen=0&ui_annotations=0&ui_theme=dark”

Learning how complex engineering machines operate can be difficult when the only educational resources you have are books or photos. 

These resources have their limitations; trainees cannot see the machine from every angle, watch it in action, or examine its internal parts.

To create powerful learning materials, saVRee focused its strategy on 3D visualization. They leveraged:

Interactive 3D models 

• saVRee replicated more than 400 engineering machines in 3D, uploaded them to their Sketchfab account, and embedded them to their website using the Sketchfab embed functionality. 
• saVRee users are able to interact with 3D models in real-time directly through saVRee’s website, making learning more interactive and engaging compared to traditional text and photos.

The Sketchfab Viewer API

• saVRee leveraged the Sketchfab Viewer API to toggle the visibility of any part of a model so that the users can view cross-sections of machinery (model sliced in half).
• The ability to explore inside each 3D model helps learners understand how a piece of machinery is built and functions.

Annotations and animations

• saVRee added animations to some 3D models to show its users how the machines operate.
• They added 3D annotations to models to highlight important components or link to additional resources, such as videos, tutorials, and quizzes.

Video tutorials 

• saVRee also recorded explanatory videos that demonstrate how to explore their 3D model embeds. saVRee went from 0 to 85k YouTube subscribers in 24 months thanks to these videos. See the example below:

The overall result is an effective and fun learning experience that is a massive improvement over the traditional method of learning.

May 2021

Many footwear brands are relying on 3D and CAD programs to design their shoes. They use tools like Modo or Roman CAD to design, and tools like Substance to texture. This work is done by 3D designers. 

At some point, the 3D designers need to show and share their designs with the rest of the stakeholders. Without Sketchfab, they either have to share the actual files—which requires the other team members to download the files, and then have a 3D program to open them—or to use alternative solutions like 2D or video renders, or even 3D printing.

With Sketchfab for Teams, the entire team gets access to a central repository where they can store and organize all their 3D assets, and where, more importantly, they can access the team’s 3D visualizations, on any device, with great fidelity.

In a traditional workflow, once a design is approved the brand will manufacture physical samples, often in Asia, and then ship them overseas for review, repeating this process a number of times until the final design is approved. Shifting to 3D means that companies get to entirely skip that part, thus saving both time and money.

Of the brands that still rely on physical samples, more and more are turning to digitization of their samples, and uploading those digital prototypes to Sketchfab so that they don’t have to ship them. Bonus: digital samples are not only easier to acquire and less expensive, they are also much better for the planet.

Once the design of a future collection is approved, a shoe brand will typically present the collection to retail outlets—the FootLockers of the world—at B2B trade shows. With COVID-related restrictions in place, those trade shows are essentially gone, and many brands have been looking for solutions to handle this digitally.

Sketchfab for Teams addresses this exact purpose by offering an online library that is easily shareable outside the company, with beautiful 3D visualization and even a built-in AR mode that lets viewers see the shoe in their own spaces via their mobile phones.

The next step is commercialization online. This has historically been one of our primary use cases, helping brands easily integrate 3D previews of their shoes on their websites and eCommerce platforms. Our viewer is embeddable anywhere with a simple iframe, and is directly supported on all eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce.

By displaying a product’s digital twin through Sketchfab, visitors can discover and interact with that product in a unique way, thus boosting ROI and conversion rates. Compared to just using the standard image carousel, our clients have observed conversion rate increases of 15 to 40% when leveraging 3D or AR.

To take the online experience one step further, Sketchfab powers 3D configurators that let visitors pick and choose from various options like colors, materials, etc. offering an infinite canvas and easy personalization for the end user. 3D configurators can be easily built using the Sketchfab viewer api, and we also offer a configurator studio to prototype custom options.

And finally, we also work with brands in-store to bridge the physical and digital. 

With direct AR support, you can easily point customers to an AR experience, as Galerie Lafayette is doing right now with brands like Dr. Martens.

If these digital solutions sound interesting to you and your shoe brand, just visit our plans page and subscribe to one of our licenses.

UQAT’s students come from various academic backgrounds, and only a few of them have solid knowledge in 3D before starting UQAT’s courses. As a result, the first hours of the courses are a general introduction about 3D covering basic concepts and elemental knowledge.

Before using Sketchfab, 

• During introductory courses, UQAT’s professors didn’t have any platform to share 3D models in real-time to familiarize their students with the fundamentals of 3D. Professors used 3D content creation softwares—like Unity, Unreal, and 3ds Max—but these tools were too complex to give a basic introduction and they didn’t allow for sharing models.
• When homework assignments came due, professors had to ask each student to upload their files to UQAT’s servers, then professors had to download the files and then upload them to a 3D creation tool (Unity, Unreal Engine…) for review—a time-consuming process.
• UQAT’s students didn’t have an easy way to share their 3D models with professors, family members, or recruiters.

UQAT created a Sketchfab for Teams account. They added more than 250 users (both students and professors) and assigned different levels of permission to each user: 

• Contributor for students: They can view, comment, upload, duplicate and download models and edit 3D settings.
• Administrator for professors: Same rights as a contributor. They can also invite and remove members, set user permissions, and change team settings.

UQAT created different “Projects” used as folders to organize 3D assets by course and assignment, with specific levels of permissions for each (See image below). 

• For example, “EFV3300” is digital sculpture and “ART1407” is Introduction for Video Game 3D.

For UQAT’s professors: Easily review and centralize students’ assignments. 

• UQAT’s Teams account is a centralized space where professors can easily collect, store, search, and access 3D assignments. 
• Professors are now able to introduce students to real-time 3D visualization.

• The different “Projects” are used as folders to organize 3D assets by course and assignment.
• Professors can easily review the assignments and add comments below each 3D model.
• Colleagues can share 3D models with each other, with their students, or publicly by choosing who can see their models (upload as public, private, password protected).

For UQAT’s students: Their work remains private and getting feedback from teachers is easy.

• • Each student has been granted a seat on UQAT’s Teams account. They are now able to upload their 3D models and explore them in real-time 3D. 
  • Students can privately publish their 3D models.
  • They can easily ask for and receive feedback from professors on their homework submissions.
  • They can also share a direct link to their model to present their work to prospective employers.

March 2021

The creation of a product in 3D usually costs from $40 to $1,000 depending on the complexity of your product, and Sketchfab’s app-free AR license starts at $129 per month. This cost will differ depending on the technology provider you choose. Read on for more details on the costs associated with creating an AR experience for your website/App.

Augmented Reality experiences are centered on the real-world enhancement of 3D models. As a result, when starting with AR, the first thing you need to do is find an existing model or create a new 3D model of the product you want to showcase in AR. 

Note that in many cases, companies already have 3D assets living with the product development team. Those models may require some optimization work for online performance, but they are a useful base. We encourage you to reach back to your production pipeline to look for existing 3D content.

If you don’t yet have a 3D model, you will need to commission one, visit Sketchfab’s Partner directory and reach out to one of our vetted partners. 

Who will build the models? 

Our trusted 3D content creators will help you re-create a 3D copy of your product. 

How much will it cost? 

The cost of creating 3D models will typically depend on the complexity and quality of your model, the method used to create the model, and the agency or artist that you are working with. On average, a simple 3D model will cost from $40 to $200, while a more complex model costs from $200 to $1000, and a very complex model can cost up to a few thousand dollars. Read our dedicated blog post on the cost of creating a 3D model for more details.

Now that you have a sense of the price of creating 3D models of your products, you will need to take into account the cost of the AR visualization technology used to create the AR experience. This technology will create an overlay to reality on smartphones and tablets.

The Sketchfab Premium license — which grants you access to App-free AR — starts at $129 per month.

Cross-platform AR

AR experiences created using Sketchfab’s technology are available on iOS and Android phones!

AR at scale

You can check and update a model’s scale using Sketchfab’s 3D Editor.

We hope this article gave you a better sense of the costs associated with adding AR to your website. To access app-free AR, just visit our Plans page and subscribe to the Premium license.

• Diversify and modernize the learning materials offered to teachers and students. 
• Create animated training courses with innovative and interactive content.
• Make sure the platform is responsive on any device: computer, tablet, and smartphone.

• Maskott created 500 educational 3D models, uploaded them to its Sketchfab account, and added them to a wide range of Tactileo’s modules—science, anatomy, architecture, etc.

Video: module using the 3D heart on Tactileo

• Students are able to interact with the 3D models and explore all angles—creating a playful, innovative, and immersive learning experience.

• The 3D annotations provide additional information on specific parts of each model and allow students to take exploratory self-guided tours of models.

• All these 3D models are also viewable in Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, thanks to Sketchfab’s 3D viewer characteristics, giving students the opportunity to immersively experience landscape or architectural scenes, for example.

• 3D, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality resources diversify the teaching methods and help students remember key concepts. These resources have been especially helpful to improve online learning since the COVID-19 pandemic brought about limited in-person schooling.

January 2021